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Emerson and the Organic Metaphor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The importance of the organic metaphor in Emerson's thinking and writing has been increasingly recognized in recent years. The formerly prevalent notion that Emerson was a great writer in spite of obvious faults and in the absence of most of the familiar virtues, that as a thinker he was rescued from his own contradictions only by some unexplainable, perhaps mystical, consistency in his character, has been forced into the background, though it still persists in many people's minds and in some published criticism. It has been progressively corrected by such investigations as those of Henry D. Gray, Norman Foerster, Joseph Warren Beach, F. O. Matthiessen, Robert E. Spiller, Vivian C. Hopkins, and Sherman Paul, in which the romantic origins of Emerson's thought and art are explored, and in which organic theories are increasingly used to explain his meanings and to evaluate his aesthetic achievements. I should like to carry this line of inquiry a little further, because I believe that Emerson should be placed more wholly in the romantic tradition than he has yet been, and that his importance depends on a more fundamental, consistent, and logical use than he has yet been shown to have made of the organic principle, which is one of the central concepts of romantic philosophy.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 This view is characteristic of most of the earlier, more generally humanistic writers such as Arnold, Brownell, John Jay Chapman, Stuart P. Sherman, and John S. Harrison; and it seems fairly pervasive, though not so dominant, in Foerster, Matthiessen, and others whose appreciation of the organic principle is stronger but not always accurate.
2 Gray, Emerson: A Statement of New England Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent (Stanford, 1917); Foerster, “Emerson on the Organic Principle in Art,” PMLA, xli (March 1926), 193-208, and American Criticism (Boston, 1928), pp. 52-110; Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1936), pp. 336-369; Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1946); Spiller, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Literary History of the United States, ed. Spiller et al. (New York, 1948), i, 358-387; Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1951); and Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
3 See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pp. 242-333; Meyer Abrams, “Archetypal Analogies in the Language of Criticism,” Univ. of Toronto Quart., xviii (July 1949), 313-327; Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, lxvi (March 1951), 5-23; and my “Romanticism and the American Renaissance,” AL, xxiii (Jan. 1952), 419-432.
4 Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925), pp. 104, 112.
5 Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), p. 74. My discussion of the differences between organicism, formism, and mechanism is based largely on Pepper's World Hypotheses (Berkeley, 1948).
6 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903-04), 12 vols.
7 For a full discussion of organicism and its root metaphor, see Pepper, World Hypotheses, pp. 280-314.
8 Cf. Peckham, op. cit. (n. 3).
9 Kenneth W. Cameron, Emerson the Essayist (Raleigh, N. C., 1945), i, 166. Cameron emphasizes Emerson's debt to Coleridge on pp. 162-199.
10 Young Emerson Speaks, ed. Arthur S. McGiffert, Jr. (Boston, 1938), pp. 128, 132.
11 Ibid., pp. 43-45.
12 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston, 1909-14), 10 vols.
13 See Whitehead, op. cit.; also Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).
14 See especially Matthiessen, pp. 100-132, and J. Russell Roberts, “Emerson's Debt to the Seventeenth Century,” AL, xxi (Nov. 1949), 298-310.
15 Uncollected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Clarence F. Gohdes (New York, 1932), p. S3.
16 “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Atlantic, l (Aug. 1882), 238-252. Matthiessen, p. 68, also singles out “The Over-Soul” for special dispraise.
17 “Emerson's Literary Method,” MP, xlii (Nov. 1944), 79-95.
18 “The Dialectic Unity in Emerson's Prose,” Jour, of Speculative Philos., xviii (April 1884), 195. (This paper was first delivered as a lecture at the Concord School of Philosophy in the summer of 1882.)
19 Cf. xii, 217-218, where Emerson credits this idea to Moritz.